Public JIRA + Service Desk = confusion (JSDSERVER-1367)

We have a public read-only JIRA for showing customers bugs/improvements in our product.

We also have Service Desk and use the customer portal to allow them to create service desk issues.

The problem is the customer can see the issues in public JIRA when they are not logged in to JIRA Service Desk, but once they login to JIRA Service Desk, they can't no longer view the issues in the public JIRA. Keeps on getting redirected to the JIRA Service Desk.

Our "work around" is to tell customers to use two different browsers - Chrome for Service Desk and Edge or Firefox for our JIRA. This is not ideal as we often link JIRA issues in comments for Service Desk issues, so there is never ending confusion by our customers who are confused and frustrated with not being able to access the JIRA when logged into Service Desk.

This was logged as JSDSERVER-1367 over 2 and a half years ago, and as seen in the comments affects many people.

1 answer

Sorry to hear of the problems caused here. There are a couple of work-arounds I am aware of that might help here:

You could follow the steps in How to customize the customer portal URL in JIRA Service Desk. By doing so you could set the customer portal to be on a separate DNS domain name than the main JIRA site where these customers are not able to login and in turn are expected to be anonymous viewers of the site. (ie support.example.com for the JSD portal and something like bugs.example.com for your public bug tracker).

Alternative to those steps, would be to have different JIRA installations for your Service Desk project and your JIRA Software project. Same idea though as above though, just a different way to accomplish this when on different JIRA installations. If each JIRA instance has a different site URL, the users logins would stay with the site they are visiting.

I think the first method is easier to do overall, because the second method would require a new install of JIRA, and possible project/data migrations. Also to separate the instances can lose some advantages of licensing (such as if you have a JIRA Software and a Service Desk license on the same JIRA instance, you can easily have those Software users make internal comments to Service Desk issues. Whereas if you separate the installations, those users can't do that)

If you spend enough time as a Jira admin - whether you are managing a single, mid-sized instance, a large enterprise one or juggling multiple instances at once - you will eventually find yourself in ...